Rooks
Amber takes her turn and waits. The rooks are a clockwork
mechanism made for gathering bones and this landing strip is littered.
You’d spat them out with mustard vigour, mouth running dry as hay
having no use for them now, you’d left them to grow old alone
heavy with the things we never said. Sometimes air gets held
tight as twigs in a blackbird’s grip but it cannot make a nest, you said.
I didn’t buy it until the machines came in to split the sums, make wounds
divide up land in a virus of furrows and crossed lines, watching
light breaking up with the dark.
Zelda Chappel writes because she has to and often on the backs of things. She has been published in a handful of publications including Popshot, Elbow Room and South Bank Poetry and was nominated for the Forward Prize this year. She tweets, often a little too much, as @ZeldaChappel